GoKawiilWe just released Scotty, a beautiful SSH task runner. It lets you define deploy scripts and other remote tasks, run them from your terminal, and watch every step as it happens. It supports both Laravel Envoy's Blade format and a new plain bash format.
Why we built Scotty
Even though services like Laravel Cloud make it possible to never think about servers again, I still prefer deploying to my own servers for some projects. I know my way around them, I can pick whichever server provider I want, and I have full control over the environment.
Tools like Laravel Forge have built-in deploy functionality, and it works well. But I've always preferred running deploy scripts manually from my terminal. I want to see exactly what's happening while it runs, and when something goes wrong, I want to be staring at the output the moment it happens, not clicking through a web UI to find a log.
For years, I used Laravel Envoy for this. It does the job, but I wanted nicer output while tasks are running, and the ability to pause execution mid-deploy. Envoy uses a Blade-based file format, which works fine for us. But not everyone wants to write Blade syntax for their deploy scripts. So Scotty also offers a plain bash format for people who prefer that.
Scotty was built with the help of AI, using the Envoy codebase as a source. Even though Scotty is a rebuild from scratch, in spirit it is a fork of Envoy. Credits to Laravel for providing the foundation. You can read the full acknowledgement in the Scotty repo.
Using Scotty
Defining tasks and deploying
You define your tasks in a Scotty.sh file. It's just plain bash with some annotation comments. Your editor highlights it correctly, you get full shell support out of the box. Here's what that looks like:
deploy() { cd /var/www/my-app git pull origin main php artisan migrate --force }
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